I grew a YouTube channel from 2k views per year to 2.4k per day | Hacker News Reader

I grew a YouTube channel from 2k views per year to 2.4k per day

chillital.com

38 pointsthechilliguy30 comments

I wonder why this is upvoted so much in such a short time. The article looks like typical SEO hacking.

It is, and unethical SEO hacking as well. Listing your competitors brands in your articles is a pretty obvious unethical hack.

I've flagged this.

Can you please be more specific about what competitors brands have I listed in the article?

Plus I don't understand what's unethical about writing a strategy around a case study.

I'd ignore that particular individual's comment. A full case study should include a qualitative discussion of the competition, and the more granular, the better.

Far from unethical, it's a best practice.

Source: I wrote a lot of papers like this for business school.

Sidenote, but I am sure Google and Co. have already optimised their systems to make competitor-naming schemes worthless re: SEO. Of course, this assumes the blog post is SEO hacking in the first place.

Back on topic, there is also a section of the Hacker News guidelines which I feel is appropriate here:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Competitor naming schemes? SEO hacking?

This case study mentions only one brand - their client.

Can you please elaborate what do you mean by that?

reverse image searching author's picture https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://conversion-apps...

https://conversion-apps.com/blog/8-best-shopify-apps-in-2021...

SEO games all the way down :)

Oh, he's a spammer too. Not surprising I guess.

Sorry, to be clear I'm not accusing anyone. Just responding to OP's point about the 'hack' he pointed out the blog post was using. I am not entirely sure what is being referred to, but would be interested to hear if anyone has any ideas?

Yeah, people are complaining that one of the strategies was using tags and mentioning competitors in 20% of those tags.

But it looks like they aren't too familiar with the YouTube tagging system. No hard feelings, you can't please everyone! :D

Also, this is NOT a blog post case study.

If anyone hasn't read it yet, it's a YouTube case study. Totally different.

"20% should be other channels’ names"

Utterly disgusting.

That's how the YouTube tagging system works, though.

No, that's how you are (ab)using it. Youtube tags are definitely not intended to be used to try to divert traffic intended for competitors to your pages.

Just re-read the post and no, that type of thing certainly isn't ideal. Apologies, OP. I'm still not sure if it's technically effectual with the YT algorithm, though. Would be an interesting talking point, that's for sure.

It's not an unethical hack, it actually helps the YT algorithm understand what category is the video part of. This works especially well in this scenario because kalari is a very narrow niche.

Tags do not boost your SEO at all, they rather help your video appear in the Recommended Videos section on the right of a YT video.

When I tagged competitors I was simply telling YT that it can show the videos to people watching another video from one of KalariLab's competitors.

There are 3 main ways to get views on YT when your channel is small:

1. SEO; 2. Homepage recommendations; 3. Recommended videos on other video pages.

The tactic with tags works only for the 3rd category above.

I hope that settles this discussion once and for all.

Sidenote: I still don't understand why this post was flagged...

It's interesting to see the pretzels you twist yourself into in order to pretend that this is the intended way to use Youtube's tagging system. Whether you are doing it to hack the recommended videos section or whether you are doing it to benefit from some other means of discovery doesn't matter: you are engaging in deception.

People watching your customers' competitors are not yours to target through their brands, but you can target them through keywords that describe the content, not to use the names of your competitors.

The fact that you are still arguing this is proof positive to me that you are an unethical operator and that this is not just an innocent mistake.

This post was flagged because it is low value, unethical and ultimately an attempt to do to HN what you are already doing to youtube. You will find that HN has considerably more effective anti-bodies against SEO 'specialists' (I use the term liberally) hijacking the audience than youtube has.

I don't think I need to have HN's rules read back to me by you.

Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by people clicking the upvote button on a post :-)

EDIT: then again, they could be getting their 'Hacker News case study' article ready...

This is my 3rd post on HN just trying the waters.

I don't know why it boomed like that so this is going to be the shortest case study ever:

We Got Over 1k Pageviews In 30 Minutes Just By Posting On Hacker News

The end

> This is my 3rd post on HN just trying the waters.

Don't.

> In this case study, I will go over our Youtube optimization strategy that helped KalariLab scale from 2,000 views per year to over 2,400 views per day, in a little over one month, without uploading any new videos.

Quite an impressive milestone to say the least. It's nice to see how they have planned this whole thing out, executed on it, and it's obviously worked quite well. On the other hand, fixating on social media algorithms can drive you absolutely bat-shit; as a personal anecdote, I used to be addicted to getting more 'impressions' on Twitter. But that got me nothing. These platforms are designed to batter your mental health for the maximum engagement. In this case, increasing 'views per year' works very well for YouTube: the channel operator is drawing more views to the website as a whole. Then, of course, YouTube generates revenue from advertising to those users.

I shall leave you with my sentiment, and good job Chillital!

I am more interested in the youtube content than the marketing.

It seems to be a form of martial art, but is it a performance or combat? I don't see any video on sparing, so it doesn't seem to be a functional combat art.

Kalari is the root of Indian martial arts, it was used in war a few thousand years ago.

You have to practice for 2 years before you will learn how to actually fight. Until then you mainly practice the movements and get your body accustomed to the flow.

They could have definitely done a better job promoting their content on this article. That carries a hint of irony in itself.

The content is in video format on their YouTube channel, publicly available.

We were case studying the YouTube SEO strategy, not the content itself.

Good content stands on its own. A youtube SEO strategy feels very hallow.

How can this post earn so much points even though it doesn't have much comments. This looks suspicious.

It's my understanding that more upvotes and fewer comments is considered good on the HN ranking algorithm.

You can grow a pine tree or a beard, but you can’t grow a YouTube channel.

Yuck.

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